


Little Employments

by handfuloftime



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24589204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handfuloftime/pseuds/handfuloftime
Summary: December 1846, two polar explorers settling into retirement.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Sir James Clark Ross, Lady Ann Ross/Sir James Clark Ross
Comments: 18
Kudos: 28





	Little Employments

Francis closing the side door, quietly enough to be sure of not waking the children, is a familiar enough sound by now that James doesn't look up from the paper. He appears a few minutes later, his overcoat discarded and the color high in his cheeks, and shuffles across the room to warm his hands at the fire.

"It's turned to snow," he says over his shoulder. "I covered up the beehive before I came in, and checked that leak in the stable roof."

"You're turning into a proper farmer, old man," James says. "And how are the little horrors?"

Francis scoffs at him as he turns away from the fire. Ann has claimed the comfortable armchair this evening, sitting with her feet drawn up under her as she looks through yesterday's _Times_. That leaves the rickety armchair that little James has bounced on one too many times, or the other half of the sofa that James is occupying; Francis picks the latter, to James's contentment. "The ladies are fit as fiddles," he says as he sits, "but I don't like the look of Sir John's leg."

"I still can't believe you named it that," James sighs. It's a mercy that Lady Franklin hasn't visited them recently.

"You have to admit there's a certain resemblance," Ann says. "And besides, he makes a very dignified sheep. It's a compliment, surely."

A tuft of Francis's hair is sticking up untidily, where his hat had been. James reaches out to smooth it. Francis idly bats his hand away and says, "I've wrapped his leg up and put a boot over it, but I don't know how long that will last—he's likely to chew on it."

"And you said the name wasn't fitting," Ann says to James, straight-faced. 

Francis laughs at that, really laughs, and James feels warmth spread through his chest. It's so good to see him happy again. When he'd left England so abruptly in the fall of '44, without even stopping to say goodbye, it had hurt more than James had been willing to tell him. And he'd only worried more as Francis's letters arrived: morose ones from France, more tranquil ones from Italy. He'd written back as gently as he knew how, but what could you say to your best friend in the world when he tells you that he feels adrift wherever he goes?

_Be a harbor for him_ , Ann had said, when he'd told her. _He'll come back_. And, as always, she'd been right. 

"Anyway," Francis is saying, "if he's still limping tomorrow, I'll drive into Aylesbury and see what Dr. Mackenzie thinks. I'm worried it's foot rot." 

"I'll go with you," James offers. "I've been meaning to—" 

"No!" Ann and Francis say in unison, forcefully enough that James looks from one to the other, bemused. 

"...Have I missed something?" 

Francis gives him that particular look of his, at once amused and exasperated. "Have you finished the chapter on the Falklands yet?" 

Ah. Damn. "No," James says, "but I—" 

"Dearest," Ann says, in her most patient voice, "You showed me the publisher's last letter. You need to finish the manuscript by the end of the year—for the sake of poor Mr. Murray's sanity, if nothing else." 

"I know," James sighs, and scrubs a hand over his face. It's not as though this is the first time he's struggled with writing. All those letters to Ann during their long furtive courtship, when he'd crossed out and rewritten line after line in search of the truest expression of his feelings. And later, trying to reply to Francis's sad, lonely letters with comfort that wouldn't ring false. This should be different, though: magnetism, geography, navigation. He's never failed to find the words for them before. But when he sits as his desk with his journals and a blank sheet of paper and tries to set it all down—Mount Erebus radiant in the eternal polar sun, the Barrier as high and unyielding as the cliffs of Dover, the frantic days of the gale in the pack—everything he writes seems a pale, shallow copy. 

He tries another angle instead: "I'm waiting on a letter from Dr. Hooker, on the botanical aspects." 

Neither of them looks convinced. James, outnumbered, knows when to admit defeat. "All right," he says, "I'll finish the chapter tomorrow. You have my word." 

After that they sit in comfortable silence for a while, the only sounds the crackle of the fire and the rustle of the newspaper. Then Ann says, "Speaking of our favorite sheep's namesake—have you seen this, Frank?" She stretches and then gets to her feet, in order to pass her copy of the _Times_ to Francis. On the way back to her chair, she circles behind the sofa, brushing her hand along James's shoulders. He leans back into the soft touch. 

Francis frowns at the paper. James knows which article he's looking at; he and Ann had talked it over earlier. Considerable apprehension, anxious applications to the Admiralty, no tidings... It's too soon to worry, in James's opinion, and there's no place at all for the level of panic the article means to encourage. But all Francis says is, "The winter came on suddenly this year, or so the whalers say." 

A fair enough point. "Bird will have known what to look for," James says. "He knows the work." _Even if Sir John might not_ , he leaves unspoken, but he reads the same thought on Francis's face. 

"Good old Bird," Francis says. "And Tom Blanky, too. I'm glad that there's someone with sense, what with that popinjay of a commander and his club of friends." 

Not quite how James would have put it, though he can't deny that he would have wanted a set of officers with more Arctic experience. But Bird is well-tried, and he's heard good things of Gore, and by this second winter the others will have learned. There's no reason for anything less than confidence. 

"Silence doesn't mean disaster," Ann points out. "It's a long way for news to travel from the Sandwich Islands." 

"True," James says. "And anyway, two years is hardly something to worry over." 

A shadow passes over Francis's face, something James can't decipher. Not quite sadness. "I suppose not," he says. Then he lays the paper aside and goes to prod the fading fire. 

"Do you wish you'd gone with them, Frank?" Ann asks. 

Francis looks into the fire for a long time. "I thought I did, at first," he says eventually, low. "When I heard that the expedition's officers had been chosen, I thought I'd missed my last chance." A rueful laugh. "But it wasn't the Passage I was thinking of, not truly." He turns away from the hearth, gives Ann a fond smile. "No, dear Thot, I'm much happier here." 

"And what about you, James?" he adds, glancing across. "Regretting your retirement?" 

James considers the question. Outside the windows, the snow is settling quietly on the garden. Blanketing a country mapped and bounded and known. He misses the North sometimes, with a sharp keen ache: hiking for hours upon hours over rough ice, every step a little further into blank uncharted space. And the beauty of it: the sundogs, the icebergs like cathedrals. The aurora. 

It had stung him, at first: the knowledge that he'd never sail through the Northwest Passage. He'd never stand on the South Magnetic Pole. But here, at his fireside, those thoughts seem a distant memory of a younger man's ambition. 

Francis settles back onto the sofa, closer than before. Close enough that James can lean sideways against him and rest his head on his shoulder. Warm and near and safe. Across the room, Ann smiles at him. 

"No," James says, and breathes a contented sigh. "No regrets here." 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Crozier’s last letter to Ross (“I would have liked to have seen your place that I might picture to myself your little employments.”)
> 
> Eleanor Franklin referred to Crozier’s “predilection for farming” in a November 1840 letter to relatives in England. The sale of Ross’s effects after his death included “Horses, sheep, pig, [and] swans” ( _Bucks Herald_ , June 21st 1862).
> 
> Crozier left England for Europe in October 1844, writing to Ross from Plymouth on October 4th about his plans (“I feel adrift wherever I am” comes from this letter). In a later letter, dated November 29th from the Hautes-Pyrénées, he apologized for leaving England without seeing them first. (Both quoted in May Fluhmann, _Second in Command_ ).
> 
> Ross’s _A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, During the Years 1839-43_ was published in late 1847, a full four years after the expedition returned to England. (The cliffs of Dover as an analogy for the impossibility of sailing through what would later be known as the Ross Ice Shelf is from the first volume). His publisher, John Murray, sent him a series of [increasingly strongly-worded letters](https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-952831069/view) about the manuscript’s tardiness over the course of 1847.
> 
> The _Times_ article is loosely based on one that appeared on December 17th 1846.
> 
> Edward Bird, who had served on three of Parry’s expeditions and was the _Erebus_ ’s first lieutenant on the Antarctica expedition, was—along with Crozier—one of the two officers Ross informally suggested as Franklin’s second-in-command when turning down command of the expedition himself: “With Franklin as its commander & Crozier or Bird as his second, I should feel no doubt of the success of the undertaking”. (To Francis Beaufort in December 1844, quoted in M.J. Ross, _Polar Pioneers_ ).
> 
> Crozier’s nickname for Ann Ross was, apparently, “Thot”—see, for example, his letter to Ross on October 4th 1844: “I do hope that dear ‘Thot’ and little one are going on well” (quoted in Fluhmann, _Second in Command_ ). Isn’t history wonderful?


End file.
